[needle0]

Much less known than Chrono Trigger, but the Game Boy RPG SaGa 3 (known in the west as Final Fantasy Legend III) was a case of Square's attempt at time travel in RPGs that came before CT. It had a lot of thematic elements in common, eg. actions in the past affecting the future, objects that appear in all time eras, separate dimensions that exist outside of the regular time continuum, etc. Unlike CT or DoTT, the eras were only decades apart, so you could also run into the same person as a kid and an adult. The same team at Square did not work on it, but it should have at least had some influence on CT.